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Can I make a unity multiplayer game for free?
Currently I am using unity personal which offers 20ccu limit. So does that mean that I can build the game and share with my 20 friends and play multiplayer for free?
Yes you can. You must just go to the unity asset store and download the photon pun. There are tons of tuts out in youtube. Have Fun playing with your friends :)
Photon as a service isn't free as I recall its a paid service with some dev capacity built in.
There are free options out there of course e.g.
Mirror
Mirage
MLAPI
Im sure there are others but those 3 came to $$anonymous$$d. They are HLAPIs and include transports that can easily handle P2P e.g. no need for server hosting.
As noted there are services such as
PlayFab (Microsoft based)
GameLift (Amazon based)
GameSparks
Photon
etc
All of these have some level of "developer" capacity that lets you get started for free. That said they are not designed to be a free server host like you are sugesting
You can create a networked game without using a 3rd party service such as the ones listed above by using one of the freely available and opensourced HLAPIs.
All of the above can be used to create P2P network structurs or Client/Server strucutres. In P2P (Peer to Peer) there is no server/service between the players they simply connect directly to each other and that means there is no need for serever hosting or paying a 3rd party. It does mean you have to deal with routing and the likes but that isn't a problem with a LAN game and there are various guides for handling it in other situations.
All of the tools noted also have big communities so easy to learn
